John Gough

John Gough, middle name “Anthony”, born in Australia in 1949, is an author, editor, and academic. John is now a retired university lecturer (in Mathematics Education), living in southern Australia, enjoying his second career as author and editor.

John’s retirement hobby-career is editing new scholarly annotated editions of important old books that are increasingly difficult to read without guidance.

His began with an Annotated Edition of C.J. Dennis’s classic 1915 Australian verse-novel, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, also known simply as The Sentimental Bloke. When enthusiastic experts who were already familiar with Dennis’s “Bloke” told John they had learned a great deal from his Annotated Edition, he knew he had succeeded.

Since then he has completed Annotated Editions for all four of C.J. Dennis’s “Sentimental Bloke” verse-novels, plus Dennis’s satirical verse-novel, The Glugs of Gosh.

This focus on verse-novels led John to an important American writer and early feminist, Alice Duer Miller’s classic verse-novel The White Cliffs (1940).

John has continued this scholarly editorial work with Annotated Editions for Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom (1910), Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians (1894), Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901), and two early prose-novels by Alice Duer Miller, The Charm School (1919) and Come Out of the Kitchen (1916).